What causes my tree leans, but it's always leaned?
Usually the tree's early life: growing at a woods edge or beside a building and reaching for light, a neighboring tree since removed, being pushed off plumb once as a sapling, or prevailing wind on an exposed site. Each produces a permanent lean the tree then corrects for at the top. Central Indiana's dense wet clay till contributes a second, different mechanism worth separating out — shallow root plates in saturated soil can tip a tree gradually across several wet seasons, and that kind of lean does come with disturbed ground, which is exactly why the ground check distinguishes the two origins.
What you'd see
A trunk off vertical with the upper crown bent back toward straight up, so the tree reads as a shallow bow or J rather than a straight stick tipped over; thicker bulged wood on one side of the lower trunk; soil flat and undisturbed all the way around the base with turf grown right up to the flare on both sides. Now the opposite list, which is the one that matters: a straight trunk tipped as a whole unit, a crescent crack or a heaved mound of soil and turf on the side away from the lean, roots lifting out of the ground, or a lean that has visibly changed against a fixed reference like a fence line or downspout.
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